An automatic analyzer for a clinical test is an apparatus for measuring specific components in a biological sample such as blood and urine. A general operation thereof is as follows. The automatic analyzer dispenses a sample and a reagent into a reaction cuvette with use of dedicated dispensation probes, stirs the sample and the reagent to cause a reaction, and performs concentration calculation for a target item based on information such as the absorbance and the emitting amount of light obtained from a reaction liquid.
An inner wall and an outer wall of the dispensation probe are cleaned with purified water before dispensing the following sample. However, in rare cases, the dispensation probe cannot completely be cleaned with purified water due to the liquid property or the contained components (protein, fat, and the like) of the sample, and the previous sample may influence a measurement result of the following sample.
As a preventive measure thereof, the dispensation probe is additionally cleaned with detergent. A general operation thereof is as follows. The automatic analyzer sucks detergent from an external detergent bottle with use of the dispensation probe, discharges the detergent in a cleaning bath, and cleans the inner wall and the outer wall of the dispensation probe with purified water.
However, the dispensation probe cannot be cleaned when the amount of the detergent decreases. In this case, the automatic analyzer needs to be set in a standby (measurement stopping) state to refill the detergent. This causes a problem in which the detergent refilling work is troublesome and a problem in which the analysis processing amount per unit time decreases as much as the period in which the measurement is interrupted.
To solve the above problems, an automatic analyzer including a detergent reservoir in which detergent refilling is automated is known (e.g., see PTL 1 to 3).